Do we just want slaves?

"I saw the references to AI making lives easier, but VSauce advocating for sending his child to a school removed from computers."

(Whoever VSauce is) sure, we can embrace the useful applications of AI but still want to learn (want our kids to learn) with our hands, with books, from experiments.

No contradiction there.

I'm getting old and I am enjoying a new, electric pedal-assist bike. But that's not what I would want my preschool kids out there learning on. (Is that analogy crap? Maybe you get the idea anyway.)

do we just want slaves? basically, yes. this captures it:

> he enjoyed the ability to create 10 prototypes out of thin air, picking on the ones he personally thought were best

prior to AI, you'd either have to make k prototypes yourself, or, if you could afford it, provide employment/work for another artist, perhaps not as creatively skilled as you but who had developed the skills to do good art/video/whatever. So AI makes you, the creator, happy because it saves you either time or money, and it abstracts away work that you consider to be a chore given your advanced skills. But to someone else that "chore" represents real work that not only provides them with the means to live, but which they also find some satisfaction in doing.

So, much like income inequality, AI makes a small number of people extra-productive or saves them money, while robbing other people of potential employment. This eventually reduces the number of skilled people, and reducing those artists to ... what, exactly? (that's the big unknown, isn't it).

Much like income inequality, we end up with two classes: a small number who use AI, stay gainfully employed and save money or can command an even higher salary because they're so productive; and a much larger number who the AI replaces, who can no longer find employment (or at least not employment doing anything that uses their skills), and become ...

statistics are not helpful.

if a small town is worried about its local water supply because a large AI DC is being built next to it, it doesn't matter whether AI only consumes 0.25% of water usage in the USA (if that's even true), they will be negatively affected and they have a right to oppose it. your stats are offensive to them because you're basically telling them that they should bear the negative consequences so people can have ChatGPT. It's not like they should suffer so that we can cure cancer or something useful like that.

> dishonest atrocity propaganda campaign against it

If anyone's being dishonest, it's the AI companies.

We're supposed to be _significantly reducing_ our energy consumption to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences, and instead here we are _significantly increasing_ our energy use (and water use, for which we don't have a "renewable" solution), and for what? so you and I can code faster with CC/Codex? I feel like all these "it's not so bad" people have developed collective amnesia about the climate change crisis.

Short of the title, yes

> A few years ago, I began to see the "labor supply" issues of slavery, and how the South was basically an economic powerhouse fueled chiefly by the labor of its enslaved people--so how do you reconcile that after the fact? How does a Union of freemen compete with that?

A large population of (deliberately kept) illiterate, uneducated people who hate their oppressors is a disadvantage to society, not an advantage. It is low-trust culture distilled to its extreme. A society like that is incapable of innovating or adapting, so it ends up leaning heavily on resource extraction. The cash crops of the South became a weak point that the Unionists exploited to their advantage in the Civil War - when the fields were razed and the shipments were blockaded, it became impossible for the Confederates to continue funding their rebellion.

> I began to consider slavery as an institution that compels "employers" to provide all practical necessities for "employees". That is, room and board and clothing are all provided to the workers, in perpetuity, and this in fact granted a lot of stability and assurance.

It is not enough for a society to merely keep its people alive. The other levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs are also important, or else your society will be unable to sustain itself, partially for the reasons I outlined above.

> Now free the slaves. Wonderful! Hurrah for equality and justice! Now, however, every employee, every worker, is totally on their own for those basic necessities of life. They buy their own clothing, they find their own housing, they're paying for all their own food, and that of their families, especially their dependents. I mean, that's a huge, huge difference. How is that even possible? Sometimes it's not. Is it any wonder we've had homelessness, and the rise of the welfare state, and slavery by imprisonment? It's no surprise.

Underlying this flawed argument is the idea that a person cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about what clothes to buy, or what house to live in, or what food to eat. Why should I trust your, or anyone else's, judgment on which people to empower with self-agency? Surely you don't need to be reminded that the colonies revolted against the British for much less egregious violations of that agency?

> So yes, freeing the slaves was the right thing to do. Let's never forget that! But we should also consider the economic "downsides" and the other side of the coin, so to speak, when it comes to the labor of free citizens, and what the average worker needs to do, just to survive, outside the confines of those vanished institutions.

Reaching this conclusion requires a naive ignorance of the second-order detriments of institutional slavery in a society, not to mention an utter rejection of basic free market principles. The ability of participants to choose what to do and how to spend is a good thing for an economy.